ABC corrupts ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’
p2pnet news view P2P | Advertising:- “My friend Leon’s Open letter to ABC,” says Muskrat John on Dork Tidings.
“Please share.”
Glad to, John. After all, it’s ‘ about ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’.
But wait …
“Dear ABC,” writes, Leon Lynn, “How could you?”
He goes on >>>
For years and years I have awaited the network broadcast of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” as the true herald of the holiday season. I brought my kids up with the same tradition — one which has been made no less special for us by the fact that they happen to be Jewish.
Tonight we sat in horror and watched what you have done to the single greatest cartoon ever made.
How many minutes did you cut out of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” so you could run more commercials?
Gone was Sally’s materialistic letter to Santa, which finally sends Charlie screaming from the room when she says she will settle for 10s and 20s.
Gone was Schroeder’s miraculous multiple renditions of “Jingle Bells” from a toy piano, including the one that sounds distinctly like a church organ.
Gone was Linus using his blanket as an improvised slingshot to knock a can off the fence no one else can hit, complete with ricochet sound effect.
Gone were the kids catching snowflakes on their tongues and commenting on their flavor.
Gone even was poor Shermy’s only line. He thought he had it bad because he was always tasked to play a shepherd. He had no idea.
And why were all these classic scenes cut? To plug more ads into the show, of course. To sell burgers and greeting cards — and to relentlessly plug the insipid-looking new Disney “soon to be a classic” show immediately following. (I didn’t watch the new show, by the way. I was laid far too low by what had just happened.)
Cramming all of these ads into the 30-minute broadcast of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” required major edits to a cartoon that has spent 44 years now trying to remind us that Christmas is supposed to transcend crass commercialism.
Do you have no sense of irony?
A couple of weeks ago I noted that you can now buy a plastic replica of the pathetic little real-wood Christmas tree Charlie Brown brings home from the tree lot otherwise monopolized by shiny fake trees. I thought we had sunk as low as we could.
Obviously I was wrong.
Oh, and by the way: The sound was half a second behind the picture: They were not synched properly. I thought this was pretty sloppy for a major TV network, but I was willing to look past it.
What I cannot look past is the chopping to bits of a genuine classic, not just to pump more ads at us, but in direct conflict with the message that has made it a classic.
When I was a kid, the annual broadcast of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was a holiday unto itself. It was the only time we ever saw ads for Dolly Madison snack cakes, for one thing. But more importantly, it actually framed the coming holiday for me in a meaningful way.
The shepherds in their fields had no corporate sponsors. Nobody had bought the naming rights for the manger. The infant Jesus did not have an endorsement deal lined up with a particular line of swaddling clothes.
Instead he came, the story goes, to preach universal love, and the abandonment of false ideals like the acquisition of gross material wealth in favor of something far more valuable.
You have not just lost sight of this, or turned your backs on it. You have stomped it into the mud.
You should be ashamed of yourselves.
But I bet you aren’t. I bet you’re way past that.
Count my family out for next year.
Sincerely,
Leon Lynn
(Cheers, Mike)
If p2pnet has value for you, help me keep it online. Cheers! And thanks : )
(If you don’t fancy online payments, please email me at p2pnet @ shaw dot ca and I’ll send you my snail-mail address.)
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Dork Tidings – Dear ABC, December 8, 2009
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It`s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Who the hell watches TV anymore anyhow? It’s gone to hell, just as the radio stations.
Use the ‘Net, they have the full cartoon without commercials or short-cuts.
December 11th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Dear Leon,
Well be more than happy to sell you a copy at the low low low price of an arm or a leg.
ABC
December 11th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
This is, unfortunately, not the first classic to be chopped to pieces. I can bet you that arm or leg that it wont be the last. Leon is right, for them to chop up THIS classic is so horrific a crime against childhood, that we cannot ignore it!
Charles Schulzt(sp?) must be spinning in his grave over this! Guess the world has finally gone to hell in a hand basket, or as R.E.M said “It’s the end of the world as we know it!”
December 12th, 2009 at 1:13 am
If they would, they could have cut off Linus’ reading of Luke!!
December 12th, 2009 at 5:24 am
I’m pretty sure rule 34 corrupted charlie brown far more than ABC ever will.
December 12th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
The corporations controlling video broadcast DO NOT CARE about content– only about the perception of content. If it looks like it’s all there, it’s all good. And by their way of thinking, who cares about a vocal minority who actually remember the missing parts?
It was a re-run (NOT syndicated, this was a rebroadcast) of an episode of Malcolm in the Middle–during which the joke about a girl named Regina Tucker was removed– in which I realized they had stopped caring about content.